Lagident

Lagident pings targets and collects information about response time and packet loss. The results are displayed through a scatter chart, which will (hopefully) help you identify anomalies across your network.

Lagident pings each target every 15 seconds.

This project was highly inspired by Meshping. However, Meshping has more features.

Web interface

Lagident has a simple web interface, where you can add new targets to ping.

By default Lagident will keep 3 days of data (~17280 measurements per target) and will display all points in a scatter chart. You can use the chart to identify latency spikes or packet loss.

For example the chart for a poor quality Wifi connection can look like in the following example. As you can see the measured latency is all over the place from 5ms to 100ms most of the time and spikes to 300ms. This connection is also suffering from packet loss. (0.33%)

Poor quality connections like this can be a pain for online gaming.

Motivation

Meshping does not store any information about packet loss. Unfortunately, I had to deal with strange packet loss issues on my desktop PC. Additionally, I wanted to embed an Angular application into Go for a long time, so I thought this was a cool project to do.

Features

• Graphs displaying latencies and packet loss
• Mobile-friendly
• Add and remove targets on the fly
• Simple Docker-based setup
• IPv6 support

Cons

Lagident is not a full-fledged monitoring solution. It is more like a stopwatch. All it does is send ping requests to targets and document the response time and packet loss. That's it. You cannot do anything else.

If you are looking for a comprehensive monitoring solution that can do more, you may want to take a look at openITCOCKPIT.

Start in Production Mode

To start Lagident in production mode, run:

docker compose up

This will build Lagident and start it together with its database. Access Lagident on http://localhost:9933.

Standalone with sqlite

First you should create a new volume to store the sqlite database file.

docker volume create lagident-sqlite-data

Now you can start the Lagident container:

docker run --rm \
 -p 9933:8080 \
 -e DB_TYPE=sqlite \
 -e PROFILE=prod \
 -v lagident-sqlite-data:/data \
 --name=lagident \
 nook24/lagident:latest

Docker Compose with sqlite

docker compose -f docker-compose-sqlite.yml up

Configuration

Lagident can be configured using environment variables. The following environment variables are available:

• DB_TYPE: The type of database to use (mysql or sqlite).
• DB_HOST: The database host (for MySQL).
• DB_PORT: The database port (for MySQL).
• DB_USER: The database user (for MySQL).
• DB_PASS: The database password (for MySQL).
• DB_NAME: The database name.
• PROFILE: The application profile (dev or prod).
• HOUSEKEEPING_RETENTION_DAYS: 3 (override to keep more or fewer days of data).

Support for x64 and arm64

The official Docker images of Lagident are available for amd64 and arm64 so you can setup Lagident on your Desktop PC, Apple silicon or a SoC like the Raspberry Pi 4 or newer.

Start in development mode

Environment setup

You need to have Go, Node.js and Docker installed on your computer.

Verify the tools by running the following commands:

go version
npm --version
docker --version

In the project directory run the command (you might need to prepend it with sudo depending on your setup):

docker compose -f docker-compose-dev.yml up

This starts a local MySQL database on localhost:3306. The database will be populated with test records from the init-mysqldb.sql file for MySQL and in the InitializeSQLiteDB function for SQLite.

Navigate to the server folder and start the back end:

cd server
go run server.go

The back end will serve on http://localhost:8080.

Navigate to the webapp folder, install dependencies, and start the front end development server by running:

cd webapp
npm install
npm start

The application will be available on http://localhost:3000.

Connect to database

mysql --defaults-file=./mysql.cnf

Acknowledgements

• This project was kickstarted using the goxygen project, thanks a lot.
• Also thanks to my brother wo created meshping, in the first place.

Naming

The name is a combination of Lag and identify == Lagident.

Release new version

1. Increase version number in VERSION file.
2. Login to Docker Registry using docker login
3. Run ./build_release

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more information.